It's Better to be Feared by Seth Wickersham

It's Better to be Feared by Seth Wickersham is a solid biography of Tom Brady and look at the New England Patriots under Bill Belichick. There's a huge amount of ground covered well in the book and below are some of the sections from it that reflect on the Amazon Kindle app as those most highlighted by others:

"The New England Patriots were a subculture within a spectacularly unhealthy world. They were defined by many of the things that defined America during the first two decades of the current century: an embrace of overwork; a refinement of craft to a previously unseen level; empiricism and a love of data, along with the creation and marketing of pseudoscience; tribalism and both its cohesive and splintering features; the pursuit of agelessness; an erosion of ethics; and finally, a zero-sum ethos toward victory."

"All athletes, especially great ones-especially those with impossible expectations for themselves-swing between extreme confidence and extreme insecurity in a way unfathomable to fans."

"Belichick's football ideology was the lack of an ideology."

"For Brady, uncertainly prompted a strange reflex. Every time he was doubted, or he doubted himself, whether he admitted it or not, he upped the stakes, to prove others wrong and to prove himself to himself."

"He taught himself to love-to be addicted to-the feeling of improvement."

"Jerry Seinfeld was once asked how he summoned the will to be great at comedy, even after his legend was secure. He replied that it wasn't about will at all. Will was required to pass on cake after dinner; this was love. He loved everything about comedy, from finding the precise language for a joke to perfecting its delivery. Belichick was the same. 'I enjoy all of it,' he later said. 'It beats working.'"

"It might not be enough to just love your job. You had to want to live in the world the job created. Working with people you like, a tribe with a common goal, would make your professional life far happier than any accolade, salary, or a company's prestige could. You need to do the work you love, at a place and with people you love. You have to feel-Brady repeatedly returned to this work-'appreciated.'"

Great sports writing - by Graff, Jenkins, Reiter & Wickersham

My favorite recent sports pieces covered a number of different subjects: a skydiver, NBA player that's improved both professionally and personally, NFL team chaplain, and players from the old USSR hockey team juggernaut.

By Michael Graff for the Feb 2015 issue of Charlotte Magazine was "Grounded," a fantastic story of competitive skydiver, and former Army Golden Knight, Cheryl Stearns and the accident she suffered just prior to her 20,000th skydive.

The first of two Sports Illustrated stories to note here was by Lee Jenkins with "Michael Kidd-Gilchrist's jump shot, voice remain a work in progress," on the Charlotte Hornets player and his diligent efforts to overcome both a stutter that began in childhood and problem in his game.

The second SI piece was "Red Army: Spirited documentary about Soviet hockey goes deep" by Ben Reiter about the recently released in theaters Red Army. Just an awesome trip down memory lane for someone who remembers the great Soviet team of the 1980s.

Written for ESPN was "Love in the Time of Deflategate" by Seth Wickersham on New England Patriots team chaplain / character coach Jack Easterby. Very cool and heartwarming look at a different aspect of the NFL world that Wickersham has written well about so many times.

Great sports stories - on Bumgarner, McCloughan & Luck

Three great pieces of sports writing from December included one on World Series MVP Madison Bumgarner, one on NFL talent evaluator Scot McCloughan and one on Colts QB Andrew Luck.

For Sports Illustrated, the excellent Tom Verducci wrote "2014 Sportsman of the Year: Madison Bumgarner" on the Giants starting pitcher with the unbelievable postseason run this year and the feature from ESPN was "The Far Sideline" by Seth Wickersham on Scot McCloughan, who helped build both the 49ers and Seahawks rosters in recent years.

The other football story that stood out to me as excellent was for the Wall Street Journal with Kevin Clark writing "Andrew Luck: The NFL’s Most Perplexing Trash Talker." The banter from Luck after being sacked is definitely different than normal and seems to either be the result of him being a exceedingly nice guy, incredibly crafty or a combination of both. Regardless of the cause, it's a fascinating approach.

Interesting sports pieces - by Wickersham, Anderson & Holmes

A couple of great pieces of recent sports writing included work from the Boston Globe, ESPN and Bleacher Report.

Two Bay Area-centric pieces were "Bill Russell, K.C. Jones treated like ‘Rock’ stars at Alcatraz" by Baxter Holmes, who is leaving the Globe to write for ESPN, and the Seth Wickersham story "Jim Harbaugh comfortable in chaos" for ESPN on the 49ers head coach.

Sticking with the football head coach theme (just in this case college and Ole Miss) was an excellent piece by Lars Anderson with "Good Guys Finish 1st: The Hugh Freeze Story" written for Bleacher Report.

Really excellent pieces all from Holmes, Wickersham and Anderson.

Great sports stories - by Jenkins, Wickersham & Jones

A few of the great sports stories I've read since my last post a few weeks ago on solid sports writing included large feature stories for Sports Illustrated and ESPN respectively as well as two shorter and really well done World Cup pieces for the ESPN website.

The latest issue of SI had as it's cover story a piece titled "Back to the Future" and it's a look by Lee Jenkins at the return to the Caviliers of LeBron James. Jenkins is an excellent writer and it totally made sense to me that James chose Sports Illustrated through Jenkins as the place to annouce the Cavs as his choice given the extremely thorough profile on James that Jenkins wrote in December 2012 for SI (and which I did a lengthly blog post on it's construction).

The recent ESPN issue had as it's largest feature story the great piece "Awakening The Giant" by Seth Wickersham on long-retired NFL star Y.A. Tittle. Each of the stories from Wickersham I've posted on previously were related to football and this probably my favorite story by him as it's a riveting telling of Tittle's life at 87 and the effects of dementia... and correspondingly on his daughter who helps care for him.

The two ESPN World Cup pieces were both by Chris Jones and marvelous storytelling with first "U.S. campaign reaches end of the line" from July 1st and then "Memories of the World Cup" written just prior to the final between Germany and Argentina. Both stories are creatively put together with the U.S. team piece going man by man through many of the players and the Cup wrapup sort of walking a path (well, actually very much walking a path with how Jones wrote it) through the tournament.

Excellent sports stories - Wickersham on Derek Carr, Svrluga on a baseball marriage & Michael Sam being drafted

Over the past few weeks three different sports stories stood out to me, one as particularly well-written, one as being on an interesting topic and a third as being just a fantastic thing.

The one I found noteworthy due to the writing was by Seth Wickersham for ESPN The Magazine with "Sins of the Brother" on Derek Carr, the Oakland Raider second-round pick at QB and whose brother David was the first pick of the 2002 draft, also at QB. Really focused look at the connection between the two and fascinating reading.

The second piece of writing that was memorable for me in the past few weeks was by Barry Svrluga for the Washington Post with "The Wife: Chelsey Desmond" about the baseball life led by the young family of Washington Nationals SS Ian Desmond. Tremendously interesting look at a family life very different than most.

The final sports story to note here wasn't writing, but the ESPN video of Michael Sam learning of getting drafted by the St. Louis Rams and kissing his male partner. Really great stuff...

Great sports storytelling - writing by Posnanski, Price, Wickersham and Phillips & videos on Devon Walker and Steve Gleason with Pearl Jam

Great storytelling can often come in many different sizes and flavors, with a few stories to note here covering multiple types of sports writing and two excellent video segments.

The two most recent pieces of sports writing to mention were both for ESPN properties with one a feature from the Oct 14 issue of ESPN The Magazine and one posted to Grantland on Oct 3. For Grantland was "The Dad-Rock Prometheus" by Brian Phillips and in it he provided a fascinating take take on Peyton Manning and how his particular brand of excellence of the old school exacting craft variety rather than youthful throw caution to the winds approach. Particularly cool from the piece was the section by Phillips below...

"I keep thinking about old astronauts. I mean the early-space-program guys, the 1960s-Apollo-program guys, the all-American nerds with rectangular haircuts. What a supremely weird group of normal people. You can get a quick sense of that from Apollo 13 if you've seen it, all those home-life scenes set in the America of cookie-cutter ranch houses and Radio Flyer wagons and Jell-O salads. Those guys were practicing weightlessness by day and then going home to drink a beer and mow the lawn and probably watch Archie Manning play football on TV. You think of transcendence in that era as coming strictly through the counterculture, but this was a group of straight-up Eisenhower-legacy Air Force vets literally working to leave the Earth. And their imaginations were on fire with it, as how could they not be, but day to day it was mostly a matter of technical detail — getting the math right, testing every last ball bearing in the engine. They were engineers, not poets, at least right up to the moment when they actually found themselves in space."

The ESPN The Magazine story I found really solid recently was by Seth Wickersham with "The Hail Mary in Santa Clara" on the San Francisco 49ers new stadium, its driving force in owner Jed York and his family history through former team owner (and York's beloved uncle) Eddie DeBartolo. It's one of those great stories that becomes great in part by being much more than expected with a fascinating narrative coming out of a piece on stadium building by someone who might be overlooked with York born into a position of power.

Two additional great pieces of sports writing to note here were "The Heart of Los Angeles" by Joe Posnanski and "U.S. Open victory the pinnacle of Nadal's unbelievable comeback year" by S.L. Price. Posnanski's piece was a beautifully written 4,000+ word essay (originally done for his SI blog) on on Dodgers announcer Vin Scully and Price provided for Sports Illustrated a great recap of Rafael Nadal's championship match.

The videos to note here also fall under the category of great storytelling on sports with ESPN segments on Steve Gleason with Pearl Jam and on Devon Walker. The 36-year-old Gleason played with the New Orleans Saints and now afflicted with ALS and Walker is the Tulane athlete paralyzed during a football game last season and whom previously I've posted on and linked to writing about. It was really excellent and inspiring work in both stories.

Solid sports writing - by Jones, Wickersham, Merrill & Price

There's been a few excellent pieces of writing I've seen recently from both ESPN and Sports Illustrated.

The Feb 4 issue of ESPN the Magazine featured "The Book of Coach" by Seth Wickersham. Written about Bill Walsh and his 550 page thesis on coaching, Finding the Winning Edge, it's compelling reading about both the book (with new copies going for $799+ on Amazon) and man himself (with his compulsion to be perfect). It was just fascinating reading within the piece about the sports writer that put together the book with Walsh and how he was treated by the 49er coaching legend.

From the same issue of ESPN was an excellent back-page column by Chris Jones. Titled "Keepers of the Cup", it's on the now concluded NHL lockout and has the subtitle "The bloated, broken NHL doesn't deserve the best trophy in sports." Solid piece from Jones that brings to mind for me the start of season NHL marketing slogan of "hockey's back"... and really, the NHL is back, but hockey never left.

Also by Jones for ESPN the Magazine was his Dec 2011 column "Watershed Moment" on surfer Garrett McNamara. It's excellent writing that's timely now with McNamara recently surfing what may well have been a 100-foot wave off the same Portugal coast that Jones wrote about just over a year ago.

The final ESPN piece to note here was by Elizabeth Merrill a few days ago for the website. "Are You a Ray Lewis Believer?" is about the Ravens linebacker as he prepares for his final NFL game in the upcoming Super Bowl. It was definitely an interesting approach that Merrill took in how she put the story together and the subject of Lewis brought to mind two really good S.L. Price pieces on Lewis for Sports Illustrated with "The Gospel According to Ray" from 2006 and "The Force of His Nature" after Lewis announced he would retire at season's end.

Excellent ESPN Writing: by Saslow, Jones, Thompson, Friend & Wickersham

There's been a few pieces from ESPN over the past month that stood out as excellent writing on interesting topics.

The June 11 issue of ESPN The Magazine had two stories of particular note to me... one a feature by Eli Saslow and the other the Chris Jones back-page column. The Saslow piece was "One light will not go out" on freestyle skier Sarah Burke who passed away as a result of head trauma suffered Jan 10 while training in Utah. Burke's story is a pretty remarkable one and Saslow tells it extremely well. The Jones piece "Best Day Ever" is much shorter in being an 800 word column and tells of a day he spent with the Stanley Cup. Very cool stuff about the impact of the experience on both the writer and people he shared the Cup with in his small Ontario town.

Another recent ESPN piece that struck me as extremely well written was by Wright Thompson for the website. "A slow walk back to normal" was posted not long after it announced that the horse I'll Have Another wouldn't race in the Belmont Stakes. The piece is about the horse's trainer Doug O'Neil and is captivating in its expression of the disappointment he felt having his horse get so close to the Triple Crown (winning the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont), but then getting injured just prior.

Finally, the ESPN The Magazine NFL Draft Preview issue from a month ago had two solid features on compelling athletes. Tom Friend wrote "Third and gold" on ex Baylor and now Washington Redskins QB Robert Griffin III and "The Stanford predicament" was by Seth Wickersham about the #1 draft pick Andrew Luck and the also extremely talented linemen that protected him at Stanford last year. Excellent writing in both pieces on some seemingly grounded and ready to succeed football players.